12 comments:

I'm not much concerned about this. We, the readers of this blog and writers of our own blogs, are a little group of people concerned about the welfare of the country and our society. Most people do not have the same concerns we have. And since all of us consider ourselves libertarian along some dimension. Why should we care. I suppose since you're a Poly Sci prof it aggravates you, but I find the ignorance refreshing as these kids could give a rats ass about government. I bet they know lots of other usefull things that will allow them to make money when they leave school

If we could only stop the crap about "the responsibility" to vote. I would love to have programs like "Rock the Vote" off the air. Just leave the voting to people that care. If less people voted, Jim Bob and I might vote.

Two good points here. One is the editing, and the other is hand-wringing about ignorance.

So, two answers.

1. You made up the 200 number, pumpkin. I would guess it was 30. And 15 idiots. 50% idiots is worrisome. I agree that the nonrandom nature of this is relevant. But if you think that some kid interviewed 200 people, you are mistaken. The real question is about the proportion. And "the proportion is small" does NOT follow from "it was edited." You are just making that up.

2. Sure, I would like to live in a society where ignorance of the basics of how capitalism and government worked were irrelevant. But we don't live in that kind of society. More and more, idiots get to make choices for all of us because we pretend democracy is a good thing. It is not. Democracy, unconstrained by domain restrictions, is tyranny.

There is another perspective on this which you seem to leave out calling those kids "idiots": the difference between knowledge and education.

Now this is what people get wrong when they watch "Who wants to be a millionaire?" and think anyone who can answer a lot of questions is well educated.

An example to clarify: Does it matter to know the exact number of federal debt or is it "enough" to know that the amount is high, why it is so high, what you could do about it and what the non-monetary costs would be doing so?

Now, I am not defending each of those kids. But it seems more important to me to know that there was a war on the road to American independence than knowing its exact name.

Now, you could say those kids fail in both ways, and you might be right. But not considering it and simply calling them idiots seems not very well educated to me.

Something I like to point out to my students: They are no longer competing against other Americans for jobs; they're now competing against kids from India, China, Brazil, etc. for jobs. Being relatively uninformed may have been fine 40 years ago. It's a recipe for unemployment, underemployment, and below-average socioeconomic mobility in the immediate future.